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Property Mis-description & School Admissions "cut off" data

4 replies

problemsolvingfordummies · 18/07/2017 22:06

My house is for sale, and the agent has listed it via a well known property portal, as is the done thing these days.

The property portal has added additional information related to local schools and has labelled our house as "outside admission area in 2016" for at least 2 local schools, even though it's not true. My agent says they can do nothing about it. I've messaged the property portal, and sent them concrete evidence to show that they're wrong, but they're just repeating the blurb from their data provider that the information is calculated in a certain way, and they're sticking with it, even though they acknowledge it's not accurate.

I contacted the Advertising Standards Agency, and it took them ages to come back with a response because they were consulting internally about it. Eventually they said that they could do nothing because their rules only cover the over-selling of products through mis-description, and in this case the house is under-sold. They also said that even if that rule changes in future (implying that it might), then it would be the Estate Agent that was liable, not the portal (even though the agent has no control over the data).

My question is - would something like this be covered under the property mis-descriptions act? Again it would probably be the agent not the portal at fault, and possibly the only thing they could do would be to take the advert offline (shooting us in the foot), so we probably wouldn't do anything about it, but I'm just curious as to whether there's any other avenue to complain about this. Of course it applies to every other property for sale in our area too - not just mine.

I've seen lots of other people complaining on Mumsnet about properties in their areas being mis-labelled too.

OP posts:
TheCrowFromBelow · 18/07/2017 22:16

The portal is making the statement and it is wholly outside of the agent's control, I don't think that would count- the PMA has been replaced by the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading regulations.
Isn't there something on the portal about how to report incorrect catchments? The catchments are supposedly based on last year's data for intake.
Your issue is with the portal not your agent.

If your property is in the catchments, and you can demonstrate that, Perhaps you could ask your agent to add something to the description.

problemsolvingfordummies · 18/07/2017 22:30

TheCrow I've emailed the property portal, and they just said they would pass the query on to their data provider. The data provider then came back and defended their method (but they also have a disclaimer on their website saying they're not responsible for how other parties use the data).

It's really the property portal that's at fault, for labelling individual houses when they know the method for calculating the data only gives an approximation at best, and at worst is wildly innacurate.

OP posts:
CupOfTeaAndAGoodBook · 18/07/2017 22:32

Get your agent to put the correct info in the property description.

problemsolvingfordummies · 18/07/2017 22:48

Get your agent to put the correct info in the property description

That's an easy sticking plaster, but it doesn't remove the incorrect information from the advert, and it doesn't correct all the other properties in the area which are also mislabelled (people won't even bother to look at ours if they have already seen that houses closer to the schools are labelled as outside of the admissions area).

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